by Tim Sultan
Nothing was said and the man looked up at the bartender. “I said, I’d really like to suck her cunt. Maybe you can set something up for me? I’ll pay.”
He pulled out a roll of bills.
“Anyone who would suck that woman’s cunt would eat shit,” the bartender replied, loud enough for everyone to hear. Sunny knew that he and Joe would have Rose do whatever they wanted when they were alone. The bartender walked over to where Joe was sitting and Joe muttered, “Let’s jump this guy.” The barkeep gave him a nod and Joe turned to Nicky and Sunny, who were leaning on the bar, and said under his breath, “Nicky, you two go out the side door. We’re going to put this guy out. When he walks through that door, you’re going to grab him and I’m going to slug him. Understand?”
It all happened very quickly and as Joe had said it would. Sunny followed Nicky outside, uncertain as to what was about to take place. He hadn’t had time to consider the possibilities. It was dark and the side of the building they had emerged from was hidden from the view of passersby. When the sailor came moments later, Nicky seized him from the front by both arms.
Clunk!
“Ugghh.”
“Je-SUS!”
The sailor sank to the pavement. Joe stood in the doorway, holding a monkey wrench. Sunny looked down at the man, now laid out in front of him. He was spellbound and disbelieving. The blow had been hard, as if Joe had put all his weight into it. The two men were now on top of the sailor and going through his pockets.
“Come on, Sunny. Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
Nicky and Sunny ran down Conover Street, past his father’s bar and down to the pier at the end of the street. They sat on the edge of a dock and looked across the water. Sunny felt sick to his stomach. He felt like mud. He felt like the sound the wrench made when it hit the sailor’s head.
The next day, Nicky saw Sunny on the street and handed him twenty dollars and said, “Here’s your half.”
“What happened to…?”
“The fuck do I know. We don’t want to know, you know?”
Sunny took the money. He didn’t hear anything in the neighborhood about it that day or the next. He didn’t see the police around that bar. He never learned what happened to the sailor. Nicky didn’t talk about it. Sunny didn’t talk about it. He knew he didn’t have anything to do with it in any real sense, but lying in the dark in Southern California he could still hear the sound of the wrench hitting the man’s skull. It had been as powerful as if they had shot bullets into him. He didn’t know, he would never know, if the sailor had managed to get up and go to his ship or if he had been dragged off and killed.
When he thought about it, he supposed Nicky Rose was still in Red Hook, trying to get the attention of the Gallo brothers, and Slow Rose was probably still going off with men who paid her a compliment. To his surprise, Sunny felt something like gratitude at that moment. Things could have turned out worse for him—his life might not have changed at all. And when he heard the rumble of an approaching jeep and saw its tapered sweep of light on the runway, he got up and stood at attention.
* * *
17
Samsara
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
—WALT WHITMAN, 1865
“When Uncle John was alive, I would come by late in the afternoon to read the newspapers and the bar would be entirely empty. There wouldn’t be a sound in the place. Uncle John allowed himself one single bottle of beer a day and he would open that bottle and open my bottle and we would sit together on the stoop if it was warm or inside in a booth. Some days the light from the setting sun would come through the window and illuminate the whole front area of the bar in this great orange glow and one could see, floating in this light, millions and millions of specks of dust and we would watch this universe of dust rise and fall in silence until we finished our beers and I would wish him good night.”
—JOHN, private investigator, at Sunny’s, late 1990s
* * *
18
Two Joes
After a newspaper reporter came to the bar once to interview Sunny for a profile he planned to write for The New York Times, a few customers were disturbed enough by what they considered the possibility of undesirable attention for the bar that they talked of leaving threatening messages at the man’s office to dissuade him from filing his story. I suggested a more sinister approach—sending a card blank but for a black hand.
The truth was that by now, any hope of keeping the existence of Sunny’s quiet had evaporated. Though Red Hook was still largely unvisited by the late 1990s, great crowds had begun to fill the bar on Friday nights, bringing to mind a Mardi Gras procession that had taken a wrong turn into a blind alley—the early arrivals were wedged tighter and tighter, mostly without protest, while the rear continued to file in without letup. People came on foot, by bicycle, boat, car, and cab, oftentimes gleefully recounting their fretful driver’s initial refusal to drive to Red Hook and the many wrong turns it had taken before they’d finally arrived here. One woman was momentarily spooked when her driver stopped his taxi on a shadowy street and got out of the car, but was soon relieved to see him kneel down to read a map in the light of his headlamp.
It gave some an evident thrill to travel to Red Hook, an idea which amused several of the natives at the bar a good deal and who alternately referred to the new arrivals as pilgrims—if they were women—or pussies—if they were men. They did this out of earshot of Sunny. He found few things more annoying than a Sunny’s regular who acted as if he were a founding member of an exclusive club.
As the number of customers swelled, Sunny enlisted the help of a local woman named Isaura, known as Izzy, whose single qualification to be a bartender, according to Sunny, was that “she’s a natural.” What this meant was that she possessed a God-given geniality and a deep-rooted mothering instinct, something for which there is a greater need in most bars than the ability to make a Black Russian. Izzy had raised two children in Red Hook as well as several animals, including a vagrant cat found wandering the street with a stick protruding from its rectum. As Sunny opined, if she knew what to do with a cat in such straits, she would know how to handle a customer who only acted as though he had a stick up his ass.
The only other adaptations that Sunny made were first opening up the back room, previously solely used for placing phone calls, and eventually surrendering his painting studio in the rear of the building, giving the expanded bar the layout of a shotgun house. When someone wondered aloud why Sunny didn’t simply open on other nights to disperse the concentration of people, he said that doing so would “take away the speciality of it.”
While the nights still began and ended with periods of near-total stillness, the hours in between teetered between bedlam, bliss, elation, and excess. At their height, people spanned the length and width of all three rooms and drinks were handed back bucket-brigade style. A bagpiper, who played police and fireman funerals by day, would sometimes suddenly erupt. A surer method of crowd dispersal I have yet to see.
Although there was a good deal of country and western as well as soul music, including the Memphis sound, the Chicago sound, the New Orleans sound, and, occasionally, the Philadelphia sound, the prevailing songs on the stereo were usually of the Top 10 variety…from the heyday of the League of Nations. On any given night, one might hear the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Slim & Slam, the Texas Playboys, both Dorseys, Ukulele Ike, Harlan Lattimore, Chick Bullock, Krupa, Noble, Whitema
n, Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Trumbauer, Holiday, as well as the twentieth century’s noblest peerage: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Kings Oliver and Cole.
By tradition, live music still began around ten o’clock. A corner of the room near the front door served as the unofficial bandstand and one often had to shimmy around a guitar or fiddle bow in order to enter or leave. Most of the acts belonged either to the honky-tonk or the Texas roadhouse school. The most soulful of these was a country blues revivalist named John Pinamonti. The most consummately ramshackle was a trio who called themselves the Gowanus Canal Boys, and when they started up with “Sea of Heartbreak” or “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” or “Cold, Cold Heart” or any other song whose theme was despair, despondency, or defeatism, waves of euphoria would sweep through the room. An amateur zoologist said that the sight of these moments reminded him of the phenomenon of flocking in the natural world—when schools of fish or large congregations of birds such as starlings or pigeons all turn and swoop in unison, their backs and undersides flashing light and dark, maneuvers so synchronized that the flock appears to be acting as one organism sending a Morse code to the universe.
—
THERE WERE A great number of eccentrics at Sunny’s during this period. They were of both the deliberate and the unaffected variety. Some were regulars and some were only passing through. A hurdy-gurdy player who sat on a bench and cranked out medieval melodies until he was begged to stop. A bug eater from Coney Island named Insectavora (she left hungry). One transvestite appeared on an enormous tricycle in the summer and sang “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” Another came to a Christmas fish fry and sang “The Girl From Ipanema.” When I once remarked to Sunny that neither had ever returned, he said, “Thank goodness they never came back! Their beauty was their rarity.”
Some of these new customers would become great friends of mine, including a moon-eyed nurse who invariably cried at the mention of mothers, miners, or Mets—she loved the first two and assisted the surgeons operating on the third. Musicians were quietly asked not to play Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon” when she was present to avoid the sudden onset of tears. In her spare time she collected both the head and pubic hair of friends and strangers, the talons and wings of dead birds she came across, and prosthetic glass eyes, assembling them into dolls that contravened the laws of nature and in some cases, decency. Mercifully, vivification was beyond her abilities. At some point she thought she might have some use for the lint that had built up around the edge of an industrial fan, and proceeded to mangle a finger. On Halloween, she liked to dress up the remaining nub, say as a pirate or, on the eve of the Kentucky Derby, as a jockey. Her future husband had a great interest in birds and he arrived at the bar on occasion wearing a hat made from a deceased Canada goose he had found alongside an Illinois road. The hat’s wingspan was wider than the bar door; he entered sideways. When they decided to marry, they traveled to Madagascar, onetime home of the world’s largest bird, the aepyornis, to see its skeleton in person and to wed themselves beneath the entwined trunks of two baobab trees known as the Baobab Amoureux. The bride wore nothing but red the entire three-week trip. Red is the color of passion.
There was a twosome who by day painted themselves metallic silver and stood as inanimate as out-of-service robots on Manhattan streets and subway platforms; they called themselves the Mercury Men but at the bar they were known, to some of the wags if not to themselves, as the Harvard Boys, for their love of argyle socks and horn-rimmed glasses when not on duty.
The more down-to-earth eccentrics were those who, like Sunny, were unaware that there was anything particularly unusual about them in any way.
There was the neighborhood firebrand, John McGettrick, possessor of the knee-length mustache. After part had frozen and broken off one cold night, his wife had had him trim the other side. “For symmetry,” he explained matter-of-factly. He could often be found talking to a pigtailed, bearded glassblower named Pete, who had once lived on a restored Hudson riverboat moored at the end of the street before moving into a tar-paper house without plumbing around the corner. Pete weighed in the vicinity of three hundred pounds, which wouldn’t have been notable if his paternal grandparents had not both been members of the sideshow troupe Rose’s Royal Midgets. He was nearly always in the company of a small black dog named Shadow when he came to Sunny’s; the two liked to sit at the bar together, sharing fellowship and, I suspected, Wild Turkey.
One of my favorite customers was Joe. Middle-aged, with coal-black eyes beneath coal-black hair, Joe customarily sat on the barstool the farthest into the bar, a corner where his back was to a wall and from which he could survey the entire room while smoking cigars. Joe claimed that seat was one of his three treasured places on earth—the other two were the ancient Black Hills of South Dakota where he had vacationed one summer (he had an interest in all things Native American) and the newly opened Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. He was of Sicilian and, by his telling, gangster lineage and although he owned a successful freight transportation business in Manhattan, Joe did little to discourage the assumption that he was both made and self-made. He drove a pricey car, smoked pricey tobacco, and took himself out to eat at pricey restaurants nearly every night. He did not like to be photographed and made it a point to turn his head away whenever someone was about to snap a picture elsewhere in the bar. Each Friday, Joe reached into his sport-coat pocket and handed each of us behind the bar an unblemished fifty- or hundred-dollar bill whose provenance I did not question. He seemed genuinely moved when I returned from a vacation in the Southwest with a present for him—a silver Navajo money clip that I had decided best combined two of his great passions.
Joe would sometimes tell me that one of the reasons he liked coming to Sunny’s was because he imagined that his grandfather had sat on these same barstools and looked at his reflection in the same bar mirror when he was a young man. He maintained that the ruthless Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront was based not on Albert Anastasia as is generally assumed, but on his own grandfather, a waterfront boss who, he said, had dispatched several of his rivals personally.
Joe’s true peculiarity was in his exceedingly mannerly behavior. In an uncourtly age, good manners can seem eccentric.
He firmly believed that an unaccompanied woman should never pay for her own drink and if he spotted one approaching the bar to order, he would call out to the nearest bartender that he would be taking care of it. He was motivated by an intuitive chivalry; this is how a gentleman behaved in the past and ought to behave today and tomorrow. Inevitably and anonymously, he also bought everyone sitting at the bar a round once, and often twice, a night, in these instances prompted by a Catholic sense of charity and by the predicament of simply having too much cash. (He confided to me that he was always looking for ways to shed some of his paper holdings.) He would continue his generous practices for the many years he would spend at the bar until he had the misfortune of buying a drink for one of the place’s most prominent temptresses. Even Sunny knew to keep some distance from her. Joe’s probity was no match against her considerable charms and this passing weakness must have shamed him greatly, because after the affair ran its course, he never returned again.
—
NOT TOO LONG after I had met Sunny, I took the subway to the Upper West Side for the memorial service of the famous New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. One of the features of living in New York was that while one may not be able to meet many of its illustrious figures in life, one could often go to their funerals. In recent years, I had been to Cab Calloway’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s. After I got home from Mitchell’s memorial that night, I reread some of his essays, including his famous barography of McSorley’s Ale House in which a man recalls the customers of a tavern in his native Ireland: “I enjoyed observing them and I enjoyed listening to them. They were like actors in a play, only the play was real. There were Falstaffs among them—that is, they were just windy old drunks from the back alleys of Ballyragget, but they were Falstaffs to m
e. And there were Ancient Pistols among them….There were good old souls among those men, and there were leeches among them.”
I would think of that passage many times. It was wonderfully apt of Sunny’s, not because everyone behaved in the exaggerated manner of a stage actor, though there was a Falstaff at Sunny’s as well—a burly, bug-eyed tilesetter who, instead of making a low-key entrance like any ordinary customer, preferred to barge in as if escaping a downpour, gruffly shout, “Sunny, you old faggot!,” hand him a bouquet of flowers, and proceed to stare down anyone who met his eyes. Rather, it was that Fridays would bring a procession of disparate personalities into the bar unlike one I found anywhere else. Some behaved extraordinarily. Very few were dull.
Joseph Mitchell famously wrote his last story for The New Yorker in 1964, and for the following thirty-some years, went to work every day, closed his office door behind him, and never published another word. I know little else about him, but I know that meeting Sunny and coming to his bar would have reminded him of some of the things he loved in life.
* * *
19
Kennedy
Sunny rarely strayed very far from Red Hook of his own accord. Our near-catastrophic expedition to Jurassic Park had served to further persuade him to keep close to home and let the world come to him at the bar. He hadn’t lost his sense of inquisitiveness, in particular for art and theater, but as sociable as he was with customers on Fridays, Sunny was somewhat of a reclusive man the rest of the week. “I’m good company to myself,” he would say. He largely avoided his family, explaining, “I love ’em but I don’t like ’em.” He enjoyed people but rarely crowds, nature only if he could observe it from his window or while smoking a cigarette on his roof. He greeted Tone’s suggestions that they drive to Prospect Park and take a walk as he might the proposal that one pay a visit to a proctologist just to pass the time. Smoking in bed, he watched television with the avidity of Chauncey Gardiner, preferring old movies starring William Bendix or Marlon Brando. One of his most treasured possessions, a gift from an actor, was a ring that had once belonged to Brando and which he would slip on when Sayonara or Streetcar or The Godfather was showing.